Second Lunar Cycle, Year of the Golden Pig: 

Slurping silver needle beneath the skyless clouds. Five Elders potluck never fails to entertain.

Bak Mei’s little minions chitter on again about their ultimate secret fist, unseeable by eye, ungraspable by mind. Chi Sin’s disciples, as always, abandon their own training to lose themselves in pointless argument, to do battle with ghosts.

Yim Wing-Chun stays quiet. Even she knows: A ghost hungers for substance; feeding it only makes it stronger; to kill such a ghost you do not feed it; you starve it.

I laugh until the silver needle spurts from my nostrils.

Twelfth Lunar Cycle, Year of the Wooden Monkey:

Mediating in the deepest cave, the sun warm on my cheek. Yim Wing-Chun has brought the boy with her again. I clench so furiously all orbits complete within me.

I whisper to her a grand secret — there is only one long routine, three volumes bound into a single book. I tell the boy that there are only 36 short forms, focused chapters within the whole.

Later, they argue. I unclench. 

Ninth Lunar Cycle, Year of the Water Dragon:

Handstands on the plum blossom posts, sipping upside down from an empty teacup. I tell Yim Wing-Chun again how I watched a fox battle a snake.Yesterday I told her a crane and snake. Tomorrow it will be fox and crane. Or maybe chicken. I have not yet decided. 

Third Lunar Cycle, Year of the Fire Rat:

Sitting by the river. So peaceful, so Chan. Laboring over the Wing Chun Codex. Adding a single, obsucre reference: “Secret heavenly meteor dummy.”Note to self: Must remember to spend next few lives watching succeeding generations drive themselves monkey-peach crazy trying to figure out what it was, why I never passed it on, and making up fake versions they can use to claim grand-mastery (or sell for cheap wine…)